Resources and Matching Text

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
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1

I have a question that spans two features:

  1. What is the intended mechanism for capturing snippets of text from Resources that I use for inspiration, quotes, footnotes? I don’t want these items to show up in compile or word counts.
  2. Where will Matching Text search apply or not? The manual says “any documents”.

What I’ve been doing, and has been working for me, as it keeps everything tidy in a single file and resources don’t show up in compile and word counts:

  1. Creating a new Document file in the Binder for each topic / chapter.
  2. Snippet of text from the associated resource into the Document Notes
  3. When applicable an External Bookmark linked to webpage of associated resource

Where it has started to fall apart is my effort to make sure I haven’t accidentally plagiarized any of my resources. I was happy to find the Matching Text feature, but it does not appear it will look into Notes fields.

I think I know the answer, but I’m not loving it. I have to create a separate Document file in Research for every resource and then create Internal Bookmarks from the file I’m writing in to the resource file? Matching Text would work here. This would keep it out of compile and word counts. Unfortunately, I’ve basically duplicated the number of files in my project (assuming every topic has associated sources), and I have to open multiple files to compare things.

Have I misunderstood anything or overlooked a better approach?

2

Hi.

In project search, at the top of your binder, click the magnifying glass icon.

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If you search in all, notes will be searched as well.
You are likely currently set to search only in text.

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3

Mine is already set to All.

I was under the impression this setting applied to manual searches done via that field. Not the Matching Text feature.

4

Yes.

I have no idea what that is.
(Windows user – I thought that you were simply naming project search this way.)
[People make new names for stuff all the time, here. :stuck_out_tongue: ..Often, the least.]

5

Behind the scenes, the actual text of a binder item and any notes are kept in two different .rtf files. I don’t know for certain, but as I can’t get Matching Text to recognise repeated sentences in the Notes fields either, I suspect you’re right and it’s only set up to work on the former, not the latter.

6

If you’d create documents for your snippets in the research folder (which will also allow you to link to them in your text), your feature would probably work, as these documents are like any others, except in a separate section of the project. (They won’t compile on their own, no worries.)

7

No, it will not. Matching Text considers only document text. (For readers not familiar with the feature, see Section 13.4.4 in the Mac manual.)

The Research folder is the intended mechanism.

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